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It’s time to spare a thought for the women philosophers

Oliver Moody

May 16 2015, 1:01am, The Times

Project leaders say women thinkers, such as Émilie du Châtelet, the French mathematician, influenced men at the time but their work is not remembered

Pick the odd name out from the following list: Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Hobbes, Conway. The answer is Anne Conway, a shy 17th-century aristocrat who is one of the figureheads of a nascent revolution in philosophy.

Between the trouncing of Socrates by Diotima of Mantinea in the fourth century BC and the primordial feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft two millennia later, a great mantle of silence hangs over the ideas of female philosophers.

A group of American academics intends to tear that veil in two. Known as Project Vox, the campaign aims to restore the reputations of three female British philosophers of the early Enlightenment — Conway, Margaret Cavendish and Damaris Masham — and an 18th-century French thinker, Émilie du Châtelet.